the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore's Law
According to this law, our computers are 1024 times more powerful today, than they were 15 years ago. And they are.
But the user-experience still sucks. Web-browsers are still bloated and slow — and need an occasional restart. You still can't talk to computers reliably — Alexa is considered the best, yet it is pathetic. Being able to reliably show something to a computer will take another 15 years, if not more.
Spammers may be able to generate spam faster, but reliably detecting and blocking their crap — without occasionally blocking real e-mails — remains elusive.
The fanciest UIs — be they by open source or commercial projects — would just stupidly hang or otherwise behave erratically every once in a while.
Hardware-makers may be doing their jobs, but the software-engineers aren't doing theirs... Not well enough, anyway.
Did the Uber driver also investigate what it was about this girl's life that led her to prostitute herself in the first place
The guy, obviously, spends too much time on Facebook. He even called the cops only after posting, which increased the risk to her health, obviously.
But, hey, the woman was 16 — in many places that's well above the age of consent. Not in California, but, be honest, had it been, say, a priest, notifying the girl's parents/teachers/police after seeing her fornicating with a boyfriend, you would've denounced his busybody nosiness.
So, it is not about sex per se — it is about prostitution (sex for money). A victimless crime, that simply should not be a crime...
Of course factories exist to provide profit for the rich factory owners.
No, you illiterate cretin, factories exist to make goods. Whoever owns them — be it the Glorious Collective or a greedy capitalist — that's their purpose...
You can shove the rest of your Bolshevik apologia to where it would do the most good...
Usually, when a new — more efficient — way of doing things arrives, a sizeable number of people complain about the poor souls used to making a living doing things the old — less efficient — way. If we seriously listened to these people, we would've still survived on hunting and gathering — in perfect harmony with nature.
That we listen to them at all is why our progress is slower, than it should be. Such people — who are convinced, factories exist to provide employment — are, to put it mildly, cretins. Uber is wrong, they say: think of all the unemployed cabbies and Taxi&Limousine Commissioners! If someone invented a miracle cure for all diseases, these idiots would try to reject on account of all the poor doctors and nurses, who'd now face financial ruin.
But TFA takes this line of thought to a whole new level. Cars, they say, are driven — at least partially — to redistribute organs...
Are you seriously suggesting that the cost of ripping up 15 miles of road (the only road for about half the distance), dynamiting the bedrock, to lay another pipe is minor?
However difficult it may have been to do, maintaining it is still harder.
government to enforce the regulations involved in delivering clean water
With proper competition this regulation becomes unnecessary — cellular phones, TV-sets don't need to be regulated to "enforce delivering" anything. If they aren't performing to customers' satisfaction, people simply don't buy them. Reviews on Amazon and/or at Consumer Reports work much better, than a government regulator, who quickly ends up in the monopoly's pocket.
Buy a plot of land and build your store
Lay the pipes, and let the water flow through them. Or, maybe, invent a high-volume water-recycling system and offer homeowners an option of reusing their water forever, replenishing what little evaporates once a month.
The people do have control on which areas the store can be built as well as a community plan about where the new housing developments are taking place.
Stipulating, such control is a good thing in the first place, so what? You also have control of where the pipes were laid... You just need to allow multiple companies to lay them, instead of picking a single one and allowing it to become a monopoly.
What they should have done, which wouldn't violate the ISP's rights, is not provide any service at all, just provide the infrastructure.
Distinction without difference. What is an "ISP", if not the means of connecting to the Internet? Seriously, a BBS? I scarcely care for the ISP-provided e-mail server — and they've shut down their Usenet nodes ages ago. What else is there I need from them, beyond the connecting cable?
Government is the best place to manage infrastructure
Not at all. It may be the only entity currently doing that (in the US), but it is hardly "the best". Tokyo has privately-run and competing subways/railway lines, why can't New York? There are several routes one can take, driving from New York to Boston — why must they all belong to and be controlled by the same entities instead of competing for the motorists' business?
This often-asked question has a simple answer — by laying them side by side. The cost of the process is, actually, a small fraction of the overall cost of maintaining the infrastructure.
there is still the problem of the people losing control of the future of their local infrastructure
OMG, "people losing control"? Are you not afraid of losing control of your area's supermarkets? There is no argument for government controlling the water, gas, or electricity distribution, that would not also apply to distribution of food (and clothing), as well as, say, construction of homes. Should all of those be socialized too?
So what you are saying is the local governments should also be forced out of the business of providing running water now that private companies are providing bottled water and water delivery services.
Bottled water does not compete with pipes. But, yes, I'd like to see a transition of water-supply (and other "natural" monopolies) from governments to competing businesses.
Then, maybe, we'll finally see some 21-st century innovation in those markets too.
That case is entirely different, because it is about local governments competing with private businesses. Such competition is inherently unfair, because the governments have a conflict of interest — they can smoothly issue all the necessary permits to themselves while sabotaging private enterprises.
The lady described in the write-up is a private entrepreneur — if true, more power to her.
would not call it a "civil war". IMO, the term "civil war" should be reserved for situations where two or more factions within a nation are fighting to seize power over the whole nation [...] I refuse to refer to the 1861-1865 war in the USA as a "civil war" because the South was not trying to take over Washington DC
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same state or country, or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly united state. The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region or to change government policies.
No, what disqualifies Russian-Ukrainian conflict from being a "civil war" is that Russia — a foreign power — is among the belligerents.
UN GA just days ago adopted a resolution finally admitting that Ukraine is a victim of the Russian military aggression.
For better or worse, the part of the United States' electorate, to whom you want to appeal, view the United Nations with skepticism. So, instead of appealing to a questionable authority, try the following argument...
Imagine, Americans, Mexican government declaring Trump's election "a coup", his assemblage of generals — a junta, which placed the Latinophobic Nazi in power, contrary to the wishes of most Americans. Out of concern for the brotherly nation, Mexican government is encouraging volunteers to cross into California, Arizona, and Texas to help the local Spanish-speaking "self-defense" militias protect themselves against the White English-speaking bigots, who've persecuted the Spanish-speaking minority for years. In places stolen from Mexico before, these polite volunteers in military uniforms without any official insignia are already organizing a referendum to leave the US and join Mexico.
Patriotic Americans attempting to resist the invasion are denounced as racists and shot at with military-style efficiency. Although officially Mexico is not a party to this "civil war", its troops are regularly encountered on the battlefields — all of them are then found to have been "on leave" from their units. Artillery bombardment of American forces seems to originate from across the border, but no one can say for sure.
Would you still say, it is a civil war — Americans fighting other Americans?
Ukrainian government does not recognize an individual's God-given right of freedom of speech, freedom to peaceably assemble, freedom of religion; or their right to bear arms
Actually, the recognition of these rights is not noticeably worse in Ukraine, than in the US.
Ukraine does not have citizen soldiers
Dude, who do you think stopped the Russian invasion from taking over the rest of Ukraine? Back in 2014 the official military was in such disarray, they could be stopped by brainwashed villagers — it was the hastily self-organized volunteer units...
Most have now been integrated into the rebuilt official military, but in 2014 it was them, who cauterized the gangrene...
Nope, not good enough. The new interface has to be not just better, but a lot better to justify changing it.
This is generally true about other things too — a replacement of anything (well, of most things) needs to be not merely better, but substantially better than whatever is being replaced to justify the costs of replacement.
Anybody arguing for a UI update of an application, must be forced to teach his own elderly parents to use the new interface — and provide them with a satisfactory explanation on why the change from what they were already used to was necessary.
the current one looks way too much like Windows 2000
Even if we stipulate, for sake of argument, that being "like Windows 2000" is bad, is it bad enough to justify forcing users to relearn?
but it is safe to assume "usability experts" were hard at work at making trendy and user un-friendly changes to it.
I share your fears. When it comes to user-interface, change is almost always bad. The new interface may be easier to use for newcomers, but the folks, who've used the program before, will need to climb the learning-curve again.
Hopefully, developers will have enough collective sense to leave some kind of "Switch to Legacy Interface" (SWILIN?) option available and sufficiently prominent for the users to select.
My concern, as I said, is an approach to fundamentalist Christian theocracy, as that looks like the most likely religious danger to the US
This fear of Christians — however "fundamentalist" — is not substantiated by any facts. Unlike the fear of Islam, which strikes world-wide near-daily.
there's a lot of secular law in the early part of the Old Testament
Only the 10 Commandments are part of the scripture. And even those come without the punishment part — people violating them will be punished in the next life, but nothing compels Christians to punish them on this Earth.
On contrast, Allah is quoted calling for killing of both those who sodomize and who lets it done to them.
The main scientific wedge issue, evolution, was decades in the future.
Wow! That's the "main scientific wedge" issue? Is it really, what keeps you up at night? What foolishness! You can continue debating evolution with "fundamentalists" for generations — no Christian will try to kill you for it! Now try to mock the Prophet...
Nobody's proposing that Mozilla have executives who argue for killing homosexuals
You propose, we should welcome more immigrants, whose religion argues for killing homosexuals. You propose, that folks, who oppose recognition of homosexual coupling as marriage, are more dangerous, than those, who argue for killing them in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this law, our computers are 1024 times more powerful today, than they were 15 years ago. And they are.
But the user-experience still sucks. Web-browsers are still bloated and slow — and need an occasional restart. You still can't talk to computers reliably — Alexa is considered the best, yet it is pathetic. Being able to reliably show something to a computer will take another 15 years, if not more.
Spammers may be able to generate spam faster, but reliably detecting and blocking their crap — without occasionally blocking real e-mails — remains elusive.
The fanciest UIs — be they by open source or commercial projects — would just stupidly hang or otherwise behave erratically every once in a while.
Hardware-makers may be doing their jobs, but the software-engineers aren't doing theirs... Not well enough, anyway.
The guy, obviously, spends too much time on Facebook. He even called the cops only after posting, which increased the risk to her health, obviously.
But, hey, the woman was 16 — in many places that's well above the age of consent. Not in California, but, be honest, had it been, say, a priest, notifying the girl's parents/teachers/police after seeing her fornicating with a boyfriend, you would've denounced his busybody nosiness.
So, it is not about sex per se — it is about prostitution (sex for money). A victimless crime, that simply should not be a crime...
Let's raise one for surveillance in general and snitching on your customers in particular!
No, you illiterate cretin, factories exist to make goods. Whoever owns them — be it the Glorious Collective or a greedy capitalist — that's their purpose...
You can shove the rest of your Bolshevik apologia to where it would do the most good...
Usually, when a new — more efficient — way of doing things arrives, a sizeable number of people complain about the poor souls used to making a living doing things the old — less efficient — way. If we seriously listened to these people, we would've still survived on hunting and gathering — in perfect harmony with nature.
That we listen to them at all is why our progress is slower, than it should be. Such people — who are convinced, factories exist to provide employment — are, to put it mildly, cretins. Uber is wrong, they say: think of all the unemployed cabbies and Taxi&Limousine Commissioners! If someone invented a miracle cure for all diseases, these idiots would try to reject on account of all the poor doctors and nurses, who'd now face financial ruin.
But TFA takes this line of thought to a whole new level. Cars, they say, are driven — at least partially — to redistribute organs...
However difficult it may have been to do, maintaining it is still harder.
With proper competition this regulation becomes unnecessary — cellular phones, TV-sets don't need to be regulated to "enforce delivering" anything. If they aren't performing to customers' satisfaction, people simply don't buy them. Reviews on Amazon and/or at Consumer Reports work much better, than a government regulator, who quickly ends up in the monopoly's pocket.
Lay the pipes, and let the water flow through them. Or, maybe, invent a high-volume water-recycling system and offer homeowners an option of reusing their water forever, replenishing what little evaporates once a month.
Stipulating, such control is a good thing in the first place, so what? You also have control of where the pipes were laid... You just need to allow multiple companies to lay them, instead of picking a single one and allowing it to become a monopoly.
Distinction without difference. What is an "ISP", if not the means of connecting to the Internet? Seriously, a BBS? I scarcely care for the ISP-provided e-mail server — and they've shut down their Usenet nodes ages ago. What else is there I need from them, beyond the connecting cable?
Not at all. It may be the only entity currently doing that (in the US), but it is hardly "the best". Tokyo has privately-run and competing subways/railway lines, why can't New York? There are several routes one can take, driving from New York to Boston — why must they all belong to and be controlled by the same entities instead of competing for the motorists' business?
"Natural monopoly" is a myth.
This often-asked question has a simple answer — by laying them side by side. The cost of the process is, actually, a small fraction of the overall cost of maintaining the infrastructure.
OMG, "people losing control"? Are you not afraid of losing control of your area's supermarkets? There is no argument for government controlling the water, gas, or electricity distribution, that would not also apply to distribution of food (and clothing), as well as, say, construction of homes. Should all of those be socialized too?
Citations needed.
Bottled water does not compete with pipes. But, yes, I'd like to see a transition of water-supply (and other "natural" monopolies) from governments to competing businesses.
Then, maybe, we'll finally see some 21-st century innovation in those markets too.
"Public" ownership is outright evil, because it is a monopoly. Corporate monopolies could be evil too, but corporations usually compete.
Government-provided service is always a monopoly — and thus always as shitty and overpriced as public subways and roads.
That case is entirely different, because it is about local governments competing with private businesses. Such competition is inherently unfair, because the governments have a conflict of interest — they can smoothly issue all the necessary permits to themselves while sabotaging private enterprises.
The lady described in the write-up is a private entrepreneur — if true, more power to her.
Although the SevenEves was a disappointment, REAMDE was not bad, and Anathem was outright amazing...
It is wrong to change the very meaning of a word and then argue, other people aren't using it correctly.
Russia has developed means to fool American drones — including the recently-supplied by the US analog Ravens.
They aren't completely useless, but they don't rule the skies either.
You are wrong, the term "civil war" in English means:
Note, that the objective does not matter... Wikipedia's expanded definition and explanation says:
No, what disqualifies Russian-Ukrainian conflict from being a "civil war" is that Russia — a foreign power — is among the belligerents.
For better or worse, the part of the United States' electorate, to whom you want to appeal, view the United Nations with skepticism. So, instead of appealing to a questionable authority, try the following argument...
Imagine, Americans, Mexican government declaring Trump's election "a coup", his assemblage of generals — a junta, which placed the Latinophobic Nazi in power, contrary to the wishes of most Americans. Out of concern for the brotherly nation, Mexican government is encouraging volunteers to cross into California, Arizona, and Texas to help the local Spanish-speaking "self-defense" militias protect themselves against the White English-speaking bigots, who've persecuted the Spanish-speaking minority for years. In places stolen from Mexico before, these polite volunteers in military uniforms without any official insignia are already organizing a referendum to leave the US and join Mexico.
Patriotic Americans attempting to resist the invasion are denounced as racists and shot at with military-style efficiency. Although officially Mexico is not a party to this "civil war", its troops are regularly encountered on the battlefields — all of them are then found to have been "on leave" from their units. Artillery bombardment of American forces seems to originate from across the border, but no one can say for sure.
Would you still say, it is a civil war — Americans fighting other Americans?
Actually, the recognition of these rights is not noticeably worse in Ukraine, than in the US.
Dude, who do you think stopped the Russian invasion from taking over the rest of Ukraine? Back in 2014 the official military was in such disarray, they could be stopped by brainwashed villagers — it was the hastily self-organized volunteer units...
Most have now been integrated into the rebuilt official military, but in 2014 it was them, who cauterized the gangrene...
Quit lying. You are not an American. You are posting from Olgino or some such place for Putin's shilling.
If you like your current user interface, you can keep your current user interface. Right?
Nope, not good enough. The new interface has to be not just better, but a lot better to justify changing it.
This is generally true about other things too — a replacement of anything (well, of most things) needs to be not merely better, but substantially better than whatever is being replaced to justify the costs of replacement.
Anybody arguing for a UI update of an application, must be forced to teach his own elderly parents to use the new interface — and provide them with a satisfactory explanation on why the change from what they were already used to was necessary.
Even if we stipulate, for sake of argument, that being "like Windows 2000" is bad, is it bad enough to justify forcing users to relearn?
Not until I can compile (or, at least, download) FreeBSD binaries of it.
I share your fears. When it comes to user-interface, change is almost always bad. The new interface may be easier to use for newcomers, but the folks, who've used the program before, will need to climb the learning-curve again.
Hopefully, developers will have enough collective sense to leave some kind of "Switch to Legacy Interface" (SWILIN?) option available and sufficiently prominent for the users to select.
This fear of Christians — however "fundamentalist" — is not substantiated by any facts. Unlike the fear of Islam, which strikes world-wide near-daily.
Only the 10 Commandments are part of the scripture. And even those come without the punishment part — people violating them will be punished in the next life, but nothing compels Christians to punish them on this Earth.
On contrast, Allah is quoted calling for killing of both those who sodomize and who lets it done to them.
Wow! That's the "main scientific wedge" issue? Is it really, what keeps you up at night? What foolishness! You can continue debating evolution with "fundamentalists" for generations — no Christian will try to kill you for it! Now try to mock the Prophet...
You propose, we should welcome more immigrants, whose religion argues for killing homosexuals. You propose, that folks, who oppose recognition of homosexual coupling as marriage, are more dangerous, than those, who argue for killing them in the first place.